Burn of the Day
Bhagpuss playing the “new” Secret World: Legends:
So, perhaps nothing much has changed after all. The big revamp has altered enough to annoy almost everyone who loved the game, but there were never enough of those to keep the lights on anyway. At the same time it may not have done nearly enough to satisfy all those who wanted to like The secret World but couldn’t, or who never even pretended to want to like it in the first place.
Posted on June 29, 2017, in Miscellany and tagged Bhagpuss, Burn of the Day, Secret World: Legends, The Secret World. Bookmark the permalink. 5 Comments.
In An Age 
I thought Secret World was an absolute delight gameplay-wise but the actual game world was so dark and grim that it just wasn’t any fun. I don’t even like horror movies but at least they’re over in 2 hours and aren’t your entire (game) life. I wonder how much sentiment like mine hurt the game.
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I loved The Secret World but never found it to be “fun”, mostly for the reasons Polynices gives. Mrs Bhagpuss, whose idea it was to buy TSW back at launch, gave up after six weeks precisely because the relentless grimdark made her dread playing it.
In some ways SWL is more “fun” because everything has been trivialized to such an extent that the true horror of the setting fades away. It reminds of nothing so much as an extended episode of Scooby Doo now.
How they propose to make this work commercially beats me.
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You know, I just realised that besides the utterly abysmal AEGIS system (which is being reworked, thanks god) what really made me stop playing was the absolutely oppressive atmosphere that became exponentially worse in Tokyo.
At this point, Scooby Doo looks great to me. Not dreading to continue playing a game is probably a good thing.
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Tried its original version, and found it to have quite possibly one of the worst feeling combat systems in an MMO. I’m amazed it’s survived this long…
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I am trying out the reboot myself, and I have to agree with Bhagpuss: just enough to annoy. I did actually enjoy TSW’s original combat system, the big weird wheel of synergies, and I miss it. I see the new system as a dumbing down – less deck-building, more reaction twitch. And the mobs, at least in the world, are painfully weak compared to the original.
It is very clear that the only reason for Legends is to wipe the slate clean for the B2P to F2P conversion, but the strategy is very odd. You have a game whose strength is its story, puzzles, and a very unique occult-conspiracy-horror atmosphere, but the novelty is finite. You have a reboot which grants the usual small marketing bounce, but almost no new story content for the returning veterans whom you need to generate some sustained buzz. When they don’t dungeon, your players will be redoing the same long-solved missions over and over to grind AP. You have four zones, no classes and ‘class fantasy’, just the weapons. Would replayability not be a top concern?
That combat system ought to be unique and mind-blowing and leave players aching to collect all the variety in it (à la ESO skill lines or FFXIV jobs) to sustain all this. Instead, I suppose they’re just betting on sufficient numbers of transient newcomers, which strikes me as precarious for this kind of niche MMO.
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